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Once upon a time, nearly three quarters of a century ago, a very properly brought up Jewish girl from the city of Przemyśl (Chemish) and what was more, her father's favorite, was filled with secret romantic dreams. Whether in spite of her ordered and protected upbringing or because of it, she privately held the excited belief that she could only find fulfillment of her strong convictions elsewhere. She became a run-away toward a “free-life” as she recalled it. This was Helene Deutsch nee Rosenbach. She fled Poland with the conviction that freedom existed in Vienna.
The experience of this European Polish militant suffragette, which was what Helene soon became, deepened her identity as a woman. Whatever vigorous part she played toward winning a professional place for women, or later for herself, she would not compromise on the subject of femininity. It is very likely that her great work we know now as The Psychology of Women, published in 1945, began to take form in those early decades.
She was moved to pity and as well to a saddened amusement by her observation that in recent years when women won major social triumphs, they often lost their battle by the facile claim that they were at long last “persons”—rather than “women.” She held these to be Pyhrric victories when gained at the cost of aborting the pleasures of feminine fulfillment.
In 1912, with her new diploma in medicine in one hand and with Felix—whom she had just married,—on the other, she set out on a long life with a man whom she described as having such an abundance of talents that they seemed a natural “gift of God.” She soon won for herself the envious appointment to Vienna's famous psychiatric clinic—the first given any woman—for her outstanding work as a clinician.
Unlike other conditions of life, where some are born